Multi-language Customer Reviews in DM News

DM News published an article about the crew over at Power Reviews concerning the announcement of a multi-language platform being used by none other than our Vancouver neighbours Mountain Equipment Co-Op whose flagship store is just around the corner. In the March 8, 2007 article "Voila! PowerReviews lets users review in French, Spanish, Italian and German" by Dianna Dilworth, we are grouped in with PR other partners who are a heavy hitting list of ecommerce vendors. As regular readers likely know, Elastic Path customers are spread around the globe and many more sell goods internationally - as such, we enthusiastically support cool tools which combine global mindedness and the openness user customer generated content. Already ready to go along with the French and English used by MEC are Italian and German (apologies to our Icelandic friends) with Chinese, Japanese and Korean coming later this year. Article snippet after the break to get you started:

“PowerReviews has several customers who sell internationally or support multiple languages, and we need to support their needs,” said Andy Chen, CEO of PowerReviews, Millbrae, CA . “In the short term, PowerReviews will be distributed through its e-commerce platform partnerships such as ATG, DemandWare, ElasticPath, Truition and Venda as the default review engine for their customers. Those e-commerce platforms already have customers in Canada, Germany, Spain, UK and France, so it is critical that we fully support their customers’ needs.”

Power Reviews are also baking in some social media integration to encourage shoppers to post their own content to support the product merchandising from the grassroots on up.

PowerReviews’ platform lets online retailers set up a single, global review platform, rather than one for each language they support. The platform includes complete localization for all review-engine functionality including tag-based review capture, review display, staff and expert reviews, as well as customer images, videos and blogs.

Note how shopper can read separate reviews (in this case the Mutha Hubba tent) written in either language and the review can be flagged for investigation (i.e. thought to be inappropriate or "planted" perhaps) plus you can denote whether the review was helpful.